Building Live Voice Agents

Chapter 1. Intelligent Agents and Collaborative AI

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This will be Chapter 1 of the final book. Please note that the GitHub repo will be made active later on.

If you’d like to be actively involved in reviewing and commenting on this draft, please reach out to the editor at [e-mail].

The way we interact with artificial intelligence is undergoing a fundamental shift. We’re moving beyond using AI as a passive chatbot that simply answers our questions and toward AI as an active partner that gets things done on our behalf. This evolution from a simple conversationalist to a complex actor is what defines the exciting new world of AI agents. In this chapter, you’ll learn how agents work by exploring the foundational concepts that led to their development. We’ll then establish a robust definition for agents that will guide how we discuss them throughout the book.

Once we have our definition, we’ll get our hands dirty. We’ll walk you through the core components of an agent and show you how to build the logic for one from scratch. Finally, we’ll scale up, first by giving agents memory for complex, multi-turn conversations and then by seeing how the field has come full circle to orchestrate powerful multi-agent systems, fulfilling a vision ...